The Vice President of American Express Colin O’Flaherty on Wednesday confirmed that the company was officially using xCurrent, a blockchain-based financial solution from Ripple Inc. O’Flaherty, who doubles as the General Manager of global commercial services UK & Russia, spoke at the last day of The Money 20/20 event held from 4th to 6th June in Amsterdam.

“Ripple offers instantaneous, point-to-point conversations between the sender and receiver of funds. And that provides a real opportunity to alleviate most of the issues our customers are facing,” he said at a discussion session at the event.

Among the panelists at the event was Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple. He spoke earlier at the event about the cryptocurrency markets, Bitcoin (BTC), and Ripple. He also highlighted the inroads the blockchain startup has made in the financial industry. According to him, more and more banks were continually embracing Ripple’s technology.

In November last year, the American Express alongside Santander Bank entered an agreement with Ripple to use its technology to facilitate and speed up cross-border payments between the US and UK. Following the arrangement, payments made via American Express’ FX International Payments (FXIP) platform were routed through Ripple’s enterprise blockchain network, RippleNet. xCurrent is integrated with American Express infrastructure will facilitate payments from customers to SMEs.

San Francisco-based Ripple is a frontrunner in the development of blockchain-based solutions for cross-border payments and settlements. Major products on the RippleNet are the xCurrent and xRapid. According to its CEO, the technology used by Amex, “it separated a connection from the cryptocurrency or the token.” He said; “what that means is that a bank or non-bank like AMEX can use Ripple to connect and just exchange value from one fiat currency to another directly, without the need for any intermediate blockchain currency.”

At the time, Marcus Treacher, global head of strategic accounts at Ripple noted that its XRP currency would be used much more in the future. “The XRP currency will come into play later on in the evolutionary dynamics and the other players,” he said.

Ripplehas now a market capitalization of over $22 billion (3rd largest). xRapid which involves the use of Ripple’s native XRP tokens have also received much attention; being adopted by many banks and financial institutions. MoneyGram trialed the xRapid in January. This led Garlinghouse to make a bold claim about xRapid, he said:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]By the end of this year, major banks will use xRapid as a liquidity tool. By the end of next year, I would certainly hope that we will see […] in the order of magnitude […] of dozens.[/perfectpullquote]